We are all slaves to the Dreaming. We invent great works, panic, and desperately try to wrest them back under our control; for this, we get called Luddites.
Social media put our entire discourse in the hands of our society's biggest assholes and idiots, just in time for the arrival of an alien superintelligence
The original point of the China Shock 1.0 discourse was not to foreground the unfairness of Chiense competition, so much as the malfunctioning of US policy and societal institutions in the face of concentrated globalization shocks.
it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.
And then I was like, okay, can you come up with an algorithm that is better than the algorithms that I came up with or that anybody else came up with and go ahead and like look at all the published work and synthesize that and then try to come up with something novel and it it's not able to do it. And I can give it a lot of time and it's it's still not able to do it.
it's not just like there's some factory somewhere that you can pay to produce the the data like you actually need to invent new novel scientific approaches
So, you have to think about the full the full thing you're trying to build not just the one piece even though that's what you might remember. You have to remember it's it's a it's a system that you're going to innovate with.
but of course, that's not what's happened, because as we've accumulated more wealth and you know, more advanced machines and and so on, we've expanded the range of things other than singers to spend our money on, and the share spent on singers has stayed sort of negligible. Um so likewise, that's sort of my central prediction about how future unfolds, though I it could go either way.
Immense scale, soulless optimization, and an insatiable thirst for growth dominate its behavior and discourse, leaving little room for the spirit and principles embodied by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
but I think he can build the uh clean room. It'll take a year or two. Maybe initially it won't be super fast, but then over time you'll get faster and faster at it. But then the really complex part is actually developing the process technology and building wafers. And I don't think he can develop that uh quickly. I think that has a lot of built-up knowledge.
Come for the stories about one of the msot storied franshises in entertainment history. Stay for the business and leadership lessons from Lorne Michaels.
So, I think it's just straight fiction. It works for the book and it works for the movie, but it's... as far as I can tell, it's straight fiction, and Crichton just made it up. If it's buried in some bit of literature, he's done better finding it than I have, and I've had a really good look, and I know how to look.
I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.
And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.
He offers a unique form of grounding on political, sports and other issues, and a way of bridging my kinds of ideas into mainstream discourse. I almost never regret reading.
And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.
But what happens when every company can just invent their own business logic really cheaply and quickly? You stop using platform SaaS, you start building custom tailored solutions, you change them really quickly.
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
But here's the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter and it doesn't exist. It's really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do.
For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.
Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.
I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists accuse physicists, like you say, of losing the plot because they need dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want dark matter and dark energy; I want something much cooler than that. I’ve tried. But you got to listen to the equations and to the data.
That’s a theatrical risk. That is a thing that can really take over how people think about this problem. And there’s a big group of very smart, I think very well-meaning AI safety researchers that got super-hung up on this one problem, I’d argue without much progress, but super-hung up on this one problem. I’m actually happy that they do that, because I think we do need to think about this more. But I think it pushed out of the space of discourse a lot of the other very significant AI- related risks.
But hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hierarchy did not originate as a political structure that humans invented for controlling and dominating one another, it is in fact a property of self-organizing systems, and it emerges for the benefit of the subsystems.
And when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago, somebody invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive. And so it is a big deal to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer.
One thing that drives me crazy about the React ecosystem, and more specifically "tech influencers" and "thought leaders" in the space, is the infantilization of the developers using and working in it. I’m tired of reading takes like TypeScript generics, mapped types, etc should only be needed and used by library authors for most use cases. Or today’s discourse; Don’t use `useCallback’, ‘useMemo’, and React.memo. If you’re building anything beyond a simple CRUD app or a an incredibly focused app with few features, you _will_ need these features.
“lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.
There were a bunch of bad trends: Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives.
Our findings suggest that the national discourse around contentious social issues, policies resulting from that discourse, and perhaps the opinions that drive discourse in the first place would be very different if people better understood how attitudes have and have not changed.
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